Annihilation
by Miss Celeste
Summary: "Years ago we would have laughed at the thought of an alien invasion. Now, it isn't us who're laughing. And what's worse than humans losing their planet? Simple. Humans losing their humanity." TF1 AU. Where the Decepticons win, and the human race reaches its final days. In this world, the Epps family must defy all odds in order to survive.
1. I Am the Hunter

_"If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans."_

 _~Stephen Hawking_

* * *

Humans are ignorant.

I don't mean that in the negative sense. Not necessarily. Years ago I might have argued that humans were actually quite intelligent. And we are. I'm not saying we're stupid. We excel at many things. Education, medication, law, politics, and much more that I don't have the energy to list. Point is, we're smart. Relatively so. But there are certain areas where we fall short. Places where humanity has yet to reach accomplishment.

Science, for instance. There's so much we know, but there's also so much that we don't know. Centuries of research and still no one knows how the first cell appeared, or how exactly the brain works, or how to manipulate genetic code.

Technology. Less than a hundred years ago, nobody knew what a cellphone was. But even in the present day, we toy with the idea of robotics, AI, hovering cars. So much we know, yet so much we don't.

But this isn't just about the physical limits of the human being.

No. We're ignorant, because of the blatant truth that we had been debating prior to this day.

Aliens. Who would have thought?

Sometimes I sit outside, rifle across my lap, thinking about how incredibly naïve we are as sentient creatures. It's that bad. All this time we imagined little green men with ray guns, or human-like androids coming to take us over, or scary black silicone-based beasts with two mouths and acidic blood. We've been creative with the idea, I'll give us that. But as broad as our interpretations have been over the years, nothing had come even remotely close to the reality. To what the aliens really are.

I was thirteen years old when they came.

Five years ago we would have laughed at the thought of an alien invasion. Now, it isn't us who're laughing.

Five years later, and my family may as well be among the handful of living humans left. The ones who fled to the most remote places we could, since the big scary aliens made their preference for big cities very clear. By that, I meant them wiping out millions upon millions of lives in the span of a few months to make room for themselves. Because they were far from anything we could have imagined coming from space. They were much bigger than what our narrow minds had come up with in the movies, back when movies still existed.

Literally. They really _did_ need the room.

I just wish they didn't think that eradicating the tiny natives was the solution.

Funny, how we've committed that crime ourselves, against each other. Now, we're all the helpless, defenseless group and they're the all-powerful, land-stealing invaders.

No one knew for sure what they really were until a few years in. Rumors spread across the rural landscape, whispers from those who somehow lived through Mission City to tell the tale of the invasion and probably died shortly after. When I said big, I really _did_ mean big, because that's what we kept hearing. I've never seen one in person, but the rumors have made me terrified to even think of a real sighting.

I've heard they reach up to fifty feet. Maybe even more. Massive titans, with red eyes that pierce your soul and armor composed of metal so hard that bullets bounce off like pitiful pieces of rubber. People have said they've seen them laugh as they squish poor little humans beneath their feet or flick us like bugs, except they're so powerful that doing so causes spines to snap. They capture survivors sometimes and play morbid games with them. Or maybe experiment on them. No one really knows.

Those who are taken into captured cities never make it back out.

These things only continued to defy humanity's science when it was discovered that they could disguise themselves. And no, I don't mean something you'd find in a Marvel comic, like superpowers. Although somehow I wouldn't be surprised if they could do any of that. I mean a disguise where people have come down to dismantling practically every vehicle in sight because they fear it could be one of them.

It's why we call them Transformers. That's what they do.

Some fly, others drive. I've heard that Vegas was overtaken by strange-colored F-22s. To the east, Chicago was mowed down by massive, self-driving tanks. Before they EMPed the planet, I vaguely remember news footage of a sentient police car leading its army eastward. Apparently, China attempted to fight back, but the smoke and fog covering their polluted cities were what allowed the Transformers to hide. The ones that flew, at least. A few bombs here, a few bombs there, and there goes about one third of humanity.

Ignorant. They never stood a chance.

The world became a deadly, lonely place. Those who survived are grouped together in isolated areas. Deserts. Forests. Little towns. Villages. Anywhere the Transformers didn't have an interest in. Not yet, at least. I suppose if there's one thing I could commend them for, it was targeting the hotspots all over the globe. Big cities. Metropolitans. The powerhouses of the world. To have control over them meant they practically had control over the Earth itself.

My family escaped before it was taken over. I don't remember much –I was only thirteen. But in the back of my memories I can vaguely hear the explosions, smell the smoke, taste the ash and see the destruction. But I try not to look that far back. It scares me, thinking about how doomed we were. _Are_.

It's still strange to this day, how empty the world is with two thirds of the human race gone. We've wandered miles upon miles across highways, and interstates, guns in hand. Not for the Transformers –because guns are a joke to those things. But because humans have this strange switch in the mindset. When all's fine and dandy, we're social animals. We crave company. The comfort of others.

But it's almost exactly how the books and the movies have portrayed it, funnily enough. The moment all hell breaks loose, we turn on each other. In a time where we'd benefit from working together more than ever, we develop this carnal instinct to defend ourselves, from ourselves. In a sense, maybe that's why the Transformers haven't bothered to kill us off after they got their precious cities.

They didn't have to. We'd kill each other off.

Because what's worse than humans losing their planet? Simple. Humans losing their humanity.

And as my mother and my siblings sleep in a run-down cabin we were lucky to find deep in the woods and I sit perched in a hunter's nest up above with my finger on the trigger, I hate realizing that this is what we've come down to. Fighting over the petty things –food, water, territory – when it doesn't even matter in the end. We're dead. Deader than dead. We're royally screwed. In fact, no one's alive anymore. We're either dead or dead-to-be.

And yet here I am. Willing to take human life. Waiting for it. I'm no better than anyone else.

 _They might not be human_ , I keep telling myself. Because, yes, that's a thing.

Nevada. That's where we first heard the rumor of the Pretenders. Transformers who've mastered the ultimate disguise –not as cars, or trucks, or planes, or jets, or tanks, or whatever the hell else we made the horrible mistake of inventing for them to imitate. No, Pretenders exist to look like us. They infiltrate. They mimic. They pretend. And then, they kill.

The most prominent story I've heard is the story of Alice. A girl who wandered into some town a few years back, when humans didn't hate each other so much. She was scared, and alone, and pretty. She looked innocent, so she was taken in. That was probably one of the biggest mistakes in human history. Legend says it took a fair amount of assault rifles and explosions before Alice went down in a mass of angry spiraling metal. But by then, she'd already wiped out hundreds of lives in that town.

And now, pretty little Alice is why humans are more prone to shooting first and asking questions later. People you might see roaming about might not be people at all.

I shuffle around in the nest. It's cold, but I welcome it. It keeps me awake and aware. The moment I fall asleep is the moment I risk my family dying, whether it be a Pretender or a much bigger Transformer or other humans deciding they want this cabin for themselves. I reach at my neck, and touch the dogtags that dangle there. My father's dogtags.

 _"I want you to keep them, sweetie,"_ Dad had told me, the day before he had to be deployed to Qatar. The last day I'd ever seen him.

 _"But why, Daddy? Aren't they yours?"_

 _"I can always get another set. I want you to keep them, so that whenever I'm gone, you can look at them and remember that I'm not actually gone. I'm still here. I always will be, sweet pea."_

Sweet pea. What I wouldn't give to hear him say those words again.

Sometimes, though, I think he's lucky he's dead. He doesn't have to struggle to survive, when surviving is now a hopeless thing. Funny how we do it anyways. Humans have a weird tendency to do a lot of pointless things.

Sometimes, I think back to the typical alien movies my dad and my older brother used to watch, and I laugh. I laugh at the irony of it, of how quickly we've come from debating and imagining extraterrestrial life to running from it. Fearing it. Being slowly destroyed by it.

 _Sorry Ripley. Xenos have nothing on these guys._

 _See this, Terminators? This is the real deal._

Something rustles in the woods and I jerk to attention. I grip my rifle and glance through the scope. Something is near, I can feel it down to the hairs on the back of my neck, standing to attention. My skin flares with goosebumps, my breath shakes from my lips. In the back of my mind, I wonder if I'm going to see my first and last Transformer, or just a deer passing by.

It's neither.

It's a man. Limping. He's closing in on the cabin, and my crosshairs centers on his head.

 _You see anything out here, you shoot it_. That's what Mom said. That's what she's trained her kids to do –to do what everyone else does. Shoot first. Always shoot first. In a world where aliens and Pretenders exist, take no chance.

But I don't pull the trigger.

I freeze. I can't. In a moment where I need to be the most focused, my mind slips away.

 _You're weak_ , a voice hisses to me. _You can't handle killing even when you're family's in danger. Weak._

Maybe my subconscious is right. My brother would do it. My mother would do it. My three younger sisters would do it, from sixteen-year-old Shareeka down to ten-year-old Sheleeka. Five long and dangerous years allowed us time to learn how to kill. That kind of thing happens in an alien apocalypse with a former Marine Sargent as your mother.

And my Marine Sargent mother bursts outside with her assault rifle in her hands, doing what I failed to do. Maternal instinct keeps her from sleeping much.

The man isn't as helpless as he seemed. Somehow I hadn't noticed the double barrel shotgun slung over his shoulder until he wields it against Mom in return. It's a showdown like no other. Mamma bear against predator. Marine Mom against potential Pretender.

"Get back," my mother snarls, like a feral animal.

The man lowers his gun, surprisingly. He holds a hand up –in the previous world it meant "not a threat". In this world, it means nothing. Not to us.

"I don't want to hurt you," he says, "I didn't –I didn't know anyone was here."

"I don't believe you," Mom says, leveling her gun.

"Why don't you stand down for a moment, and we talk this out?" the man tries, but he has no idea who he's talking to. There's a very important thing he'll come to know in the next few moments. You don't tell my mother to stand down.

Sargent Monique Nadia Epps _does not_ stand down.

She lunges at him, and the man aims his shotgun up again.

I'm frozen again. I need to do something. Say something. But I don't, and all I can do is watch as my mother as she disarms him with long-practiced skill. Some little thought in my head goes, _damn, five kids and she can still do that?_

In the old world, one might say she's overreacting. That she's being too irrational, too bloodthirsty. But now, it's perfectly reasonable. The man is possibly a Pretender, and there's only one way to find out. You can't let a guy go and risk him coming back with his bigger buddies. That's a big no-no. He has to die. He has to.

They fall to the ground. I'm immediately alarmed when I see my mother overtaken with such ease, like no effort was needed to take on a soldier like her. She's hissing and spitting and biting and he's trying to wrench her rifle away, so that he can empty a clip through her skull. He's too strong. Too fast. He's a Pretender.

And that voice in my head says, _this is it, Moza. Time to stop being weak._

And I do stop. This is the night where I aim at my first Pretender, pull the trigger, and fire. His head explodes, and he slumps off of my mother. She snaps up, and heaves and glances up at me.

And she smiles. A near death experience, and she smiles.

A part of me feels proud. The other part is terrified. Of her? Of the Pretender? Of myself? No idea. But something in this moment scares me.

I realize what it is when I get to the forest floor. My knees grow weak and I struggle to make it to her. But I do –I tough through it, because that's what they do in the movies and that's what you're supposed to do during an apocalypse in a dead country. You tough it out. _You killed something. Big deal, Moza!_

I'm surrounded by death and destruction. But causing it is a whole different and disturbing feeling. Never mind it's a Pretender –I ended a living being's life. Is this what Mom feels, every time she took a life in the past? Is this how Dad felt?

But then I see the guilt melting away Mom's tough-Sargent face. Guilt is something you never ever see in this day and age anymore. Nobody regrets. No one _. So why now, Mom? What's the problem?_

I find out when I look.

I blasted the guy's head alright. If anything, Mom should be proud of my precision. But there are no wires, or sparks or metal. I see the blood and the brains and suddenly I'm turning away and hurling up the stale bread and gamey deer we ate earlier. I vomit violently enough for my stomach to ache and my throat to burn, but the only real pain I feel is in my heart, where it constricts, mourning for the life I've so mercilessly taken.

 _He tried to kill Mom_ , the voice says.

"He was human," I say out loud, "Oh my God, Mom. He was _human_."

Mom embraces me. My siblings file out, but they don't ask questions. They see the dead body and they know enough. They just crowd around and try to comfort me as I come to the realization that this truly _is_ what we've become. Shooting first. Always shooting first. It's come down to us killing each other off –just what the big scary aliens want.

I hate them. I hate them so much. I wish I could walk into Mission City where it all started, look the Transformers in the eye and scream, _"This is your fault! This is all your fault, you stupid, ugly, evil, non-feeling robotic bastards!"_

 _So that's how it's going to be, Moza? Crying and screaming and blaming the aliens for his death? You pulled the trigger. Not them._

The human mind sucks. Sometimes I wish we weren't so smart. Less complex brains equal no voices in my head. Maybe we would have died out quicker, too.

 _But nope. Homo sapiens just had to be top dog. Had to be the ones to suffer the aliens' wrath. Lucky us._

"Moza," my mother says, but I don't answer. I'm trapped in my head, drowning under the waves of doubt and fear and grief and self-hatred.

She grabs my shoulders and makes me look at her, "Mozambiqua. Look at me."

I do. My eyes drip with tears.

"You did the right thing," she whispers, "You saved me. Saved all of us. Human or not, he would have killed us."

I just nod. I don't say anything else for the rest of the night. I don't sleep either.

And when we leave only a few hours later, with the cool air biting and the sun blooming with golden light over the horizon, I think about what Mom said _. You saved me. Saved all of us._

 _Yes, Mom, I did. But at what cost?_

The cost? My humanity. I can feel it slipping away like a life line breaking, leaving me to fall deeper and deeper into a hole I won't be able to escape from. A hole the Transformers dug for us, but didn't bother to force us down. They knew we'd do that ourselves. I wonder how that conversation went.

 _Hmm, what should we do now?_

 _Oh, I know! Send out the Pretenders, and let the humans exterminate themselves!_

 _Gee, great idea, fellow killer robot! Let's do it!_

Disgustingly smart sons of bitches, they are.

So, here we are. Trekking across land that isn't even ours anymore. The clock is ticking. It's only a matter of time until my family adds to the billions of lives already gone.

We're walking along a dead interstate when Dad's voice whispers to me, _"Sometimes, sweet pea, you've gotta be a little scared to be a little brave."_

I touch the dogtags. _Damn right, Dad. Damn right._

And with each step I take, the rifle in my grip, the one I've used to kill, gets heavier and heavier. That was the first life I've taken. Somehow, I know it won't be my last.

* * *

 **I'm going to need reviews for this one, guys. This was just a pilot chapter, so your feedback will really help. Continue? :)**


	2. I Am the Prey

"You're overthinking it."

Fred falls to the back of our group, beside me. I don't look at him. I just keep my eyes forward. Whatever grand speech he's about to give, I'm not in the mood for it. But my older brother doesn't let up. He stares, until I'm forced to glance at him and snap, "Easy for you to say. You haven't done it yet."

"What? Saved the family?"

"No. Kill."

He frowns at me and I have to turn away again. Sometimes, it's hard to look at him. He looks and sounds a lot like Dad.

"Maybe not," he says, "But you _did_ do the right thing, Moza. Even if you don't think you did."

There he goes. God, he's practically Dad's clone. From the looks, down to the wise words. I want to slap him and hug him at the same time. Instead, I shift my M16 and cough awkwardly. The air tastes stale and dry. Has been since the invasion.

Fred seems to know I'm not up to talking about it, so he just squeezes me for a moment and falls behind to take the back. Mom's taking point, as always. The youngest stay in the middle. It's some sort of mix between Mom's maternal instinct and her military training to keep us in this formation.

Someone else falls beside me, but I don't notice until they touch my arm. It's Sheleeka –Shelly for short, but she likes when I call her Lele. It's hard to look at her, too. No ten-year-old should be wielding an AR15 like a seasoned soldier.

"Was it hard to pull the trigger?" she whispers.

And suddenly, I feel like crying. That's not a question she should be asking me. A little sister's supposed to ask things like: _What's high school like? How do you put on makeup? Can you teach me how to braid? What's your first kiss like?_

But alas, that world is long gone. I need to stop mourning it, because it's not coming back. I have to come to terms with the fact this world had gone cruel and that my ten-year-old sister has to ask how hard it is to take a life.

For a long moment I say nothing. I can't; the words in my head spin around like a messy, wild hurricane I can't slow down. So I swallow the lump in my throat and I grasp my bearings with an iron grip and I hug her briefly and say, "Yeah, Lele. It was."

Shelly nods, smiling sadly. I reach over and ruffle her hair and revel in the rare, innocent giggle it entices. Her fluffy curls get in her eyes and she has to toss her head around until they're out of her face. My hair's more like Mom's –less frizzy and looser curls. I keep mine in a bun, though. I'd given up taking care of it years ago.

Our trek is quiet, as usual, aside from my other two sisters murmuring to each other. Shareeka and Shaniqua are really the only ones who talk as much as they do. The rest of us fall silent –Mom trained Fred and I to listen to our surroundings. Shelly's upbringing in this world has made her inherently silent.

"I wonder what they look like," Shaniqua whispers –we call her Nika. She's sixteen like Shareeka, who goes by Shari. They're twins, with the faces of Mom and the spirits of each of our parents. Nika's more of the calm and curious type –kind of like Dad in the laid-back aspect. Shari's our mother through and through –tough and feisty and too bold for her own good.

"I don't," Shari snorts, "I just want them dead."

"But aren't you just a little curious?" Nika asks, "Could you imagine seeing one up close? They must be huge."

"Nika, we'd be dead if we ever got close to one," Shari retorts, retaining her bitter attitude towards the Transformers since the two of them were eleven, "Did you not get the memo for the last few years? They're not friendly. There _are_ no friendly Transformers."

Nika just shrugs, but I can tell she still thinks about it. I swear, her curiosity's going to get her in trouble one of these days. I can't say that I haven't been fascinated with them myself, but it's kind of hard to stay fascinated when they're also, you know, killing us off. But for a moment I ponder on what it would have been like if they were friendly. How would Earth be different, if these guys had come to help rather than harm?

 _Hello there, little humans! Fear not, we're here to help, even though we're huge and scary and will probably accidentally step on a couple of you!_

Then I think _, no wonder they chose to kill us. They probably saw us killing ourselves and killing our planet and decided, "Heh, what a bunch of pests. Better save poor Earth."_

And then I've trapped my mind into a troubling loop of questions. Are the Transformers really the infestation here? Or are we?

"Heads up," Mom barks, and immediately we fall into bent knees and sharp eyes. I see that we're approaching a gas station. Mom probably plans on seeing if we can loot it. We're approaching the outskirts of Denver –dangerous territory. We generally stay away from cities, but there's not a lot of places to loot from in the barren countryside, and we've already had more than a few run ins with hostile farmers.

Mom's taking a risk here. But she and Dad strived in risks and danger. It's something she'd been trained to thrive in for a decade, and it's something she's training us to thrive in now.

 _"Nothing's too dangerous when you're careful enough,"_ she once told us, _"In this world, it's time you kids start to learn_ how _to be careful enough."_

Gives a whole new meaning to throwing us into the deep end, doesn't it? We have to experience risk, in order to learn how to manage it.

There's dismantled vehicles everywhere, predictably. It's not uncommon to find wheels and pipes and entire car doors lying around here and there. I eye the ugly, misshapen mounds of metal of varying sizes, and some part of me fears that one of them is going to come to life. I grip my gun just a little tighter.

"Shelly, Shari, Nika," Mom points away.

They don't hesitate. My younger sisters dart off the road, and disappear into the trees. We figure it's probably harder for giant robots to catch and kill you if you're in the woods. Pretenders, too.

"Fred, Moza," Mom says, and we're flanking her quickly as she approaches the long abandoned _7-Eleven._

Fred automatically rounds the station. Mom and I go inside. It's the same disaster-stricken sight we've seen every few weeks when we venture towards cities. Shattered windows, busted down doors, overturned shelves, and the putrid stench of expired foods and rodent dung. Never gets old. Our boots crunch against the pieces of glass scattered on the floor, and our eyes take in each and every detail in our surroundings.

Anxiety and tenseness pricks at my skin and drives deep down into my bones. For a moment, I wonder if this is how it feels, to be the prey. I think about the deer and the gazelles and I think, _holy hell, how do they live their whole lives with this fear?_

We spend a few silent moments searching. It's so quiet that I can hear my own heartbeat pounding into my ears. It's always knocked up a few more beats per second whenever we do this. I accidentally kick aside a glass bottle and the sound startles me half to death. _Jesus, Moza. Get yourself together!_

"Clear!" Fred hollers from outside.

"Clear," Mom says, coming around from the front of the store.

"Clear," I say, after taking a deep breath and lowering my M16. My mother notices my shaken composure but I turn away and start looking for anything salvageable. I'd rather not tell her how I'd nearly shot up a _Budweiser_.

She doesn't question it. Instead, she nods to Fred, and he jogs back outside and waves –a signal for our sisters.

"This place has been looted already, Mom," I say. I drop my backpack and take a harder look around, "I don't think we'll find much here."

Mom sighs softly. She digs through some pastry packages left behind, but they're molded and stinky. She scans the store herself and her eyes land on those refrigerated display cases that you'd always hate to go through in the store because it's colder in that area. She approaches them –mindful of the glass since, of course, their doors have been broken, too.

"There's stuff back there," she says, "In the storage room."

"Really?" I'd expect looters to go for the storage room first. Not everyone's that smart though, I suppose. Or maybe they were in a rush and decided to raid everything they saw. I venture over and squint to look beyond the empty drink racks. Sure enough, there are stacks of crates and boxes on the other side.

"Jackpot," I say. I rip open the glassless door –not sure why, since there's, you know, no glass- and begin to push at the drink racks. They slide out one by one, until we can squeeze through and enter the storage room. I shiver. It's at least ten degrees cooler in here.

It's not as much as we were hoping, but it's still a lot more than what we've ever found before. The food's long gone, though –even when kept cold, it's all five years past its due date and none of us are hungry enough to go down that route yet. But there are about four crates with fresh cool water, flavored and non-flavored.

I'm thrilled that we even have a choice. Eagerly, I grab at least five bottles of _Propel_ to stuff in my bag. I used to love this stuff before the invasion. Mom wisely goes for the normal water. My sisters flock to the storage room soon after, and we stock up on as much as we can. The food is a minor loss –in desperate measures, Fred's discovered that he's a phenomenal hunter. He has Dad's patience and has a keen eye with his silenced sniper. He's tried to teach me a few times –I'm the only other one who can stand sitting in one place for hours watching for deer. But just like how Fred discovered what he's good at, his lessons determined what I'm bad at.

Basically, I really suck at long range accuracy. I'm kind of glad I hadn't thought of military too much after high school.

 _Not that it made much of a difference. Here I am, still killing people._

My stomach clenches uncomfortably. The memory of the previous night threatens to resurface and I forcefully shove it back down. Fred's right. I'm overthinking it. I need to get over it. Accept it. _This is your life now, Moza. People die all the time. Can't afford a bleeding heart._

And then, I hear it.

It's that little, tiny voice in your head –the one that tells you you're in trouble, even when it doesn't feel like you are. It's the voice I imagine a gazelle hears when it's being stalked, or a deer when it's in the crosshairs. It's the flight instinct of the prey, that urge that's buried deep in the genes. _You're in danger, Moza! Danger!_

And like a deer or a gazelle, I shoot straight up. I look around, I scan for the threat. But all I see is Fred and Mom fitting bottles in their bags, and the twins idly wandering around, and Shelly holding little gadget toys she wishes she could have played with if she had a childhood. I weave around shelves and aisles until I'm at the front of the store, and I search. Still, there's nothing. Still, that voice cries.

 _Danger! Danger! Danger!_

 _I'm going insane_ , is what I think. But then it hits me –prey does more than see. We have more than one sense for a reason, damn it. So I perk my ears and I inhale, and I part my mouth. I let that voice guide my senses, and I wait.

I don't see anything. I don't smell or taste anything different. But my ears pick up a subtle rumbling. I think it's thunder at first and I wonder, _what the hell, instincts? Thunder's not dangerous._

Then I think _, wait, that's not thunder._

Then I look again.

Then I'm bolting back inside, and I'm shouting louder than I have in five agonizing years, "They're coming! They're coming!"

"What's coming?" Mom yells back. I tumble into her arms. I jerk back, grip her shoulders hard, and give her the are-you-seriously-asking-that look. It becomes evident enough when everyone else begins to hear what I'm hearing.

The steady _thump, thump, thump_ in the air.

The distant, angry growls of engines down the road.

And all I can think is, _oh my actual god, it's a whole freaking army._

Fred bolts to the doorway and I follow. We glance once, and then dart back, as if we've been struck. He looks at me, looks at Mom, looks at our sisters, and says, "We need to go. Now."

"Are you crazy?!" I say, "They'll see us. Did you see how many there are? We'll get freaking vaporized if we try to go now!"

"What?" Shari yelps, "You mean there's more than _one_?"

"There's a fleet of them coming from Denver," Fred says, "They might be passing by."

"Does this mean we're totally dead?" Nika squeaks.

"No," I snap, "The storage room. Let's go."

Mom grabs me before I lead the way. She shakes her head, "What if they have Pretenders?"

"What if they don't?" I say, "It's risk, Mom. If we're careful enough, we'll be okay. Right?"

She still hesitates. She's teetering between her strategic training and her motherly instinct that can end up with a rash decision. Everyone else bolts for the storage room and she follows after a quick moment. But I look around while they slip through one by one and I'm suddenly one step away from a heart attack.

"Shelly," I say, "Where's Shelly?"

The ground trembles. Our ears are then graced with the lovely, ear-splitting roar of aircraft that's way too close to the ground. Combine that with the helicopter thuds, and we may as well have an earthquake. It's deafening and we're forced to cover our ears in hopes that our eardrums don't burst.

But in that moment, I could care less if I can't hear. I burst back out from the storage room and I race around until I find Shelly kneeling and crying with her palms to her ears. Someone dashes past me and grabs her. I hadn't realized that Fred followed me.

The roar reaches its piercing peak, and then it's gone. I glance outside just in time to see a trine of jets blast away. The screeching noise is quickly replaced by the rumble of ground-bound vehicles. It's only a matter of time until they spot us through the big window, and this gas station goes _ka-boom._

"Shelly, come on!" Fred hisses, yanking her up. I look up and around, and then I see it. A loose ceiling tile. Before I know it I'm on top of a heavy meal shelf and I've rammed the back end of my M16 into the tile and it gives way. I lift it and slide it aside. Fred's already caught on and he's lifting our petrified sister up so that I can help her climb into the hole. In the back of my mind, I realize this is a much better place if Pretenders decide to come in here, but there's no time. I can only hope no one comes in and finds the storage room.

 _Risk_. I hate it.

The helicopter thumps rattle my insides. The engines are becoming deafening. _Jesus, there's so many._

I haul myself up inside. Fred follows right behind, but the ceiling creaks uneasily with his added weight. We shuffle around until we're all settled, and I slide the tile over the hole until there's only a crack that we can glance through. We're safe up here, but the rest of us aren't.

 _Dear god. Don't come in here. Don't come in here._

Fred shifts. The ceiling creaks. I hiss at him, _"Stop moving!"_

We listen. I can feel the vibrations through the entire building. My eyes dart around, but I never see anything come through. I just hear them on the road and in the air, until it grows steadily silent and all we can hear is our own breathing. I lose count of the minutes. Ten, maybe? We don't dare move until we can be sure they're all gone.

Fred shifts again. _Creak_.

"I think they're gone," Shelly whispers. She seems to have snapped out of the shock she'd been in earlier. I notice her AR15 on the ground below us.

"Maybe," I murmur. I pull the tile aside a little more, so I can look around better.

Something crashes. It sounds like a shelf on the other side, near the entrance, where I can't see.

 _Is that Mom? Did they come out?_

I consider venturing down. It's been at least fifteen minutes. The squadron of Transformers must have moved on by now.

I look down again, just in time to see a massive mass of black and silver metal weave through the aisles.

 _Oh. Guess not._

I hear Fred and Shelly inhale deeply. They see it, too. I try to follow it, but it's moving so quickly and smoothly that I'm not even sure what I'm looking at until it halts in front of Shelly's AR15. I examine the way it's moving and how it's shaped and I realize I'm not looking at a Pretender. Or… well, not the Pretender we generally think of.

It looks like a big cat. Sounds like one, too. I can hear the deep, robotic growl that distantly reminds me of a tiger, maybe. But this thing's way bigger than a tiger. It's burlier and taller and made of metal. I have to blink a few times, because it's difficult for me to believe what on this dead Earth I'm looking at.

 _So, they can be animals, too? Great. No, yeah, that's freaking fantastic. As if they weren't terrifying enough before._

Its head lowers to the gun. I watch it prowl around, until its head moves upwards and I have to pull the tile over the hole completely before it can see us. I'm terrified. I can feel my blood pumping, my skin flaring with goosebumps. Shelly's breathing loud enough that I have to slap a palm over her mouth. I hear a loud noise, and the low purring and growling of the big scary robot cat. Closer, this time.

 _It's on the shelf,_ I think. _It can smell us. Like a real cat._

It feels like an eternity has passed before I hear it jump down. Lost interest, maybe? Can't determine where we went after the shelf? I dare to peek from behind the tile again, and in a heart-stopping moment, I see the cat's… metal tongue flick out and its head swivels towards the drink displays. Towards the storage room.

Two things happen in this moment.

One, I say _"screw you"_ to my prey instinct and I grapple for my M16.

Two, Fred springs into action, too. Or tries to. But the moment he shifts this third and fateful time, the ceiling gives, and he plummets through the weak tiles and onto the floor below.

The big robotic cat springs into motion before I can. The damn thing leaps over two whole aisles like they're nothing and it pounces on Fred with jaws wide open.

Fred's clever. He knows he can't escape it in that moment. His head's going in that mouth filled with jagged, nine-inch teeth whether he likes it or not. But the one way he can avoid it is to put something else here. So as I scramble down I see him grab Shelly's AR15 and he holds it up so that the cat's jaws clamp around it instead. You'd probably be expecting that movie cliché, where the monster chews and chokes on the object and the protagonist is able to hold it back by that alone.

Nope.

That AR15 crunches into pieces like it's a plastic toy. Bits of metal and drops of robot cat slobber fly everywhere as it wrenches its head and roars.

Fred has nothing to protect him now. So I do the one thing I can think of to draw its attention. I raise my M16, and I fire. I scream and yank the trigger and let loose. _Let's see if your armor's as hard as they say, pussy cat!_

I feel a pinching pain in my side, but it's so minor that I don't pay attention to it. I have more important things to focus on. Like jumping out of the way, when a giant robot cat lunges at me. But I don't see where I'm going, and I tumble off the shelf and hit the floor with the breath knocked out of me. The cat roars and jumps after me. For a moment, all I can focus on is the deadly, red glare of its one and only eye.

More gunfire erupts. The cat's one red eye is suddenly shattered to pieces and it shrieks and scrambles back. I look behind me to see Mom and the twins firing away, pushing the beast back until it retreats behind a different aisle, thoroughly blinded.

"Moza, run!" Mom screams, and I do. I clutch my M16 and I join Fred as we make a break for it to the entrance. I see Nika and Shari already darting across the road.

I don't make it to the door.

I hear a sharp snarl, and I'm snatched back so quickly that my head spins with whiplash. I hear screaming ringing in my ears. It doesn't even occur to me that it's mine. But I hear the cat's growling and I feel the powerful yanking of its jaws and I'm being dragged away by its teeth lodged deep into my bag. My back becomes wet. It must have punctured some water bottles.

 _Damn it, robot cat! I really wanted those Propels!_

My fingers fly to the bag straps across my stomach. I rip them apart and I manage to shrug off the bag, freeing myself. But this isn't a stupid robot cat. I look back and see it drop my ruined backpack and it lunges at me again.

"Moza, move!"

The world is dizzying in this moment. I'm so panicked that I can't see properly, but I listen to the shout and I move, jumping aside in hopes that the cat's momentum lets it charge past. It charges alright, with its jaws wide open again. And I'm right –it does miss me. Instead, it lunges right into the end of a broomstick.

Shelly yelps, but as the giant cat lands on her, it only succeeds in shoving about two more feet of broomstick down its own throat. You'd think it's ineffective, but a pole in anything's throat won't feel very nice. The cat practically collapses on the spot and I'm able to snatch Shelly away before she's flattened under at least two thousand pounds of robotic feline.

I watch it convulse and hack on the floor. For a brief second I feel like I'm looking at a housecat ready to unleash a real nasty hairball, and it's almost an amusing sight. But then I see duel barrels pop up from the top of its haunches and I just barely manage to piece together the sight before I duck down and drag Shelly down with me.

 _Alright, Moza don't panic! Big scary robot cat just happens to have guns, too! No big deal!_

"Shelly, run!" I screech as we barely manage to dodge more blasts coming our way. Then I see Mom and Fred ram into a shelf. It tumbles over and smashes over top of the cat's hind quarters, pinning it down. It's probably not heavy enough, but at least the cat has something else to deal with other than a broom down the gullet.

I don't think I've sprinted this much in my entire life. We run out and across the street. We don't even bother to check if anything else is here. We're doing nothing but listening to the prey's voice –that voice in our heads screaming _run, run, RUN!_

And we do. We run until we've reached the safety of the trees. We run until we feel we've put enough distance between us and the threat. We run until Fred suddenly halts, and we're forced to stop just inside the tree line, yelling at him to move.

"Wait," he says. He turns back around. I watch him lift his sniper and aim.

"What the hell are you doing?" I shout.

"What I haven't done yet," Fred says, glancing at me, "Kill."

He fires.

And then we retreat to the woods, so that we don't get hit by any debris as the poor abandoned _7-Eleven_ explodes.

* * *

 **Fun fact: All these characters are canon. Epps's family is mentioned in the _Revenge of the Fallen_ novelization.**

 **Thank you for those who reviewed! I'm glad it's getting attention. If you like this story, please don't forget to give me your feedback, even if it's just a few words! This is something that hasn't been done before, so I'm eager to see what you guys think of something like this. Should I write more? :)**


	3. I Am Cassiopeia

Remember that pain in my side? The pain where I thought it was no big deal?

Yeah. I was wrong.

I try not to make noise as Mom swabs it with alcohol. The stinging pain threatens to make my eyes water, but I bite my lip and clench my fists in the grass and I tough it out. Because, again, that's what you've got to do in an alien apocalypse. _Tough it out, Moza. Tough it out._

Mom pulls out a pair of tweezers. I look at her like she's about to murder me.

"This is going to suck, isn't it?"

Mom grimaces, "Afraid so, honey."

She plunges them into the wound without giving me a chance to prepare. She probably did it because she knew I'd start freaking out if she drew it out. I don't scream, but I do yelp. I throw my head back and force myself to stare at the stars while my mother digs quickly through the injury. The pain isn't as intense as I was expecting, and I find it strangely easy to tune it out while I lose myself to the sky.

The spray of stars is mesmerizing. Out here in the wilderness with no unnatural light, they shine and sparkle, like precious jewels in a breathtaking display. I try to pinpoint constellations, but the trees block a lot away. I focus on a memory instead.

I remember sitting out in the porch with Dad. Fred and I are in his lap, and he points at the hidden images in the night sky. Scorpius. Taurus. Cassiopeia. Capricornus. And his favorite, Orion.

 _"Almost named you that, Fred,"_ Dad had said, smiling, _"Orion."_

Nine-year-old Fred had looked up at him, with big curious eyes, _"How come?"_

 _"Dunno. I felt like it suited you,"_ he chuckled. Kissed Fred's head, _"Your mama won that argument, though. So we made it your middle name, instead."_

Fredrick Orion Epps.

Orion, the most talented and skillful hunter Greek mythology had ever known.

I don't think Dad realized the true symbolism of that name. It's sad, because every time Fred comes back with a fresh kill, I think about how proud Dad would have been, and my heart hurts all over again.

"Got it," Mom says. I look up as my thoughts and memories fade. I'm pulled from the stars' beautifully hypnotic peace and dragged back down into the ugly, chaotic Earth.

Mom lifts the tweezers and reveals a bloody bullet.

I scrunch my nose and look away.

"You got shot, Moza?" Shelly asks. She's cuddled with Nika and Shari, in front of the small pile of embers we'd created.

"Yeah," I nod. Then I wince as Mom cleans the entry wound again.

"Who shot you?"

I sigh and grumble, "Myself."

 _Just your luck, right Moza? So bad at shooting that you're a hazard to yourself._

Shelly clearly doesn't understand what I mean by that. But the twins do. Nika frowns and Shari clarifies, "Ricochet."

"Rico… what?"

"Ricochet, sweetie," Mom applies a patch, "One of Moza's bullets bounced back and hit her."

Shelly looks horrified, "Oh."

I reach for her. Shelly wriggles out from between the twins and takes my hand. I squeeze hers and I smile, "It's okay, Lele. The bullet lost power so it didn't go through me. I'm okay."

She leans forward and I sit up so that she can cuddle herself against me. It doesn't hit me until then that she must be grasping how close she was to losing me. How close she was to losing everyone. She's too young to be dealing with life-or-death situations. I hold her close, wishing there was a way I could turn back time if only for Shelly to live a safer, normal life.

"I guess the rumors are true, then?" Shari whispers. She glances at her rifle at her side, "Bullets just bounce off of them. Guns are useless."

"Against them, maybe," Nika says. She hauls her own gun into her lap and holds it like it's her one and only lifeline, "But people are crazy these days. We can't just go around unarmed."

Shari snorts and looks away, "They're the reason _why_ people are crazy. They want us to go crazy. So they can watch us kill each other."

Mom snaps, "Not in front of Shelly, please."

Useless thing to say. Shelly's already been exposed to me blasting someone's skull to pieces. But it's not that that bothers me. It's knowing that Shelly's already so accustomed to the concept of death, that seeing it for the first time hasn't bothered her much at all. I'm sure Mom knows that already. She's probably saying that for her own sake, not Shelly's.

Fred appears after a few heavy moments of silence. To our surprise, he doesn't have a kill. Not that we need one right now –we have enough food to last a week or so. But Fred likes to go out and hunt anyways, though I've felt that it's more for him to keep sane in his world rather than to preserve what we have.

"Nothing?" I say.

Fred shakes his head, "I'm heading west. Better luck there, maybe."

Mom frowns, and so do I.

"That's back towards Denver," Mom says.

"I know."

I note the tone in his voice. Immediately I catch on to what's going through his mind, and I throw him the nasty 'don't-even-think-about-it' look. Fred just counters it with his sharp 'don't-say-a-damn-thing' expression.

Something in me screams that I need to tell Mom what he's probably going to do instead of hunting, but that other part of me –that curious little Moza who's fighting against logical Moza – is saying, _stop lying to yourself Moza. You want to know, too._

Fred knows. He asks me, "Want another lesson, Moza?"

"Sure," I say. And then we go.

* * *

"We're going to die doing this, just so you know."

Fred does something in reply that I haven't seen him do in years. He laughs. It's a hearty, soft chuckle that really only succeeds in stabbing my heart with the pain of Dad's memory. Fred must know that. He stops himself quickly.

"Maybe," he murmurs, "Maybe not. Depends on how fast you can run with that wound."

I snort. Mom tried to make me stay back. But she didn't catch on to our mutual idea. And that bullet barely made it a few centimeters through my skin, anyways. It's probably going to scar, but it's very minor. I've definitely had worse even before the invasion. A field hockey stick to the ankle at full force, for instance. _Now that mess hurt!_

Fred pulls me close suddenly, "Thanks, by the way. For saving me back there. I would have gotten shredded."

I smile just slightly. Then I shrug him off, "Told your ass to stop moving."

He laughs again. I want him to stop and keep going all at the same time. "Yeah, I guess you did. But hey, we fought off a huge angry robot cat and survived to tell the tale. Awesome, right?"

Ah, Fred. Always seeing the positive on a planet full of negative. He has a point though. There's not many alive right now who've had first-hand experience with a Transformer and survived. Something in me wants to take pride in it. But really, it just makes me fear that our next encounter might be our last. It's a pure miracle we haven't died already.

We trudge on. Fred looks up every now and then, "Stars are pretty tonight."

"Yep," I say.

He frowns, "You haven't even looked."

"I try not to, Fred," I choke out.

Fred hugs me again. He already knows what I mean. Too many memories.

 _"Daddy! Daddy! What's that one?"_

 _"That one's you, sweet pea. That's Cassiopeia."_

I was surprised. I'd looked up at him and gaped with a wide, innocent gasp, _"That's me?"_

Dad had bounced me in his lap. And he'd smiled, _"Yeah, baby girl, that's you."_

Look up. You see that 'w' high in the sky? Go on, look. Dad was right. That is me. To him, I am a Greek queen. To him, I am a woman with unrivaled beauty, sitting on her throne looking out upon Aethiopia. To him, I am Cassiopeia.

Mozambiqua Cassiopeia Epps.

We reach the outskirts of Denver again within maybe an hour. The moon is full tonight, allowing for us to have a better lit view of our surroundings than most nights. We hover just behind the trees, guns in hand, eyes scanning around us. I feel like a deer, daring to venture out across a road in fear of being shot or flattened.

Prey instinct: _Dangerous, Moza! Very, very dangerous!_

 _No shit instincts. I get it, all right?_

"Mom's going to kill us," I say.

"Not if this kills us first," Fred replies.

"She'd just find a way to kill us again."

Fred laughs. Then he bolts forward, and I follow.

That _7-Eleven_ is nothing but a huge smoking pile of debris. And it smells. Really bad. Like smoke and burnt foods and suffocating gasoline. I have to take a few steps back and gasp for clean oxygen before I force myself to follow Fred closer to the disaster. He's already stepping between scorched metal and concrete, nudging debris aside with the barrel of his sniper. There's still small patches of fire here and there.

"Think you won this round, Fred," I say between coughs, "There's no way that thing survived this."

Fred shakes his head. Kicks aside slabs of metal, "I have to make sure. It should still be here."

"Uh. It's probably a giant puddle of liquid alien metal."

"Look for a giant puddle of liquid alien metal, then."

I don't find any. What I do find, though, are plates of alien metal from under a shelf I'm pretty sure we'd toppled over Mr. Metal Fluffykins before we bailed. I pick a piece up, startled by how _heavy_ it is for a piece of armor that's only half as long as my arm. I turn it over in my fingers. It's cold and smooth and black as night. And incredibly thick _. No wonder they're bulletproof. A freaking missile wouldn't go through this!_

"Fred," I call, showing him the plate.

Fred rushes over and takes it. His brows rise when I give it to him –clearly he's just as surprised by the weight as I am. He turns it around himself, looking more and more troubled by the second.

"It's not melted," he whispers, "It doesn't even look _damaged._ "

I pick up another plate. Smaller, but still heavy. Like holding a milk jug. "So they're bulletproof _and_ fireproof. Just freaking brilliant."

Fred drops the armor and sighs, "The explosion must have blasted pieces off of it, but…"

"It's still alive," I finish for him, feeling a wave of cold hard dread threaten to take me over and drown me, "And now, somewhere out there, we have a _very_ pissed off giant robot cat on the loose."

* * *

He's in pain.

It aches, like a raging inflammation in the protoform. The fire's sizzled beneath his armor and set alight the delicate lines that lie beneath. Every movement hurts. Every sound is muted and muffled from the booming vicinity of the explosion. Every nanosecond is painful and terrifying when he can't see, can't hear, has nothing but the lifeline of his bond to keep him going.

It's not enough.

He collapses on the road.

No sight. No sound. Only the pain and the darkness and the distress of his master.

It's rare, for his master to be afraid. His master never fears. Never stresses. He hardly ever even feels.

But now, in this moment, his master cries and calls for him and all he can do is cling to their bond with a weak spark, grip the connection so tightly that it almost physically hurts and wail, _"Here! I am here!"_

Shivers of that soul-gripping fear tremble within the bond. His fear of death. His master's fear of loss. Both synchronizing into high, terrifying notes of the inevitable. They delve deep into a link so rarely known among their kind –a connection that ran deeper than the Well itself. It's impossible to determine where one starts and where the other begins. They are one, as they always were.

Iridescent emotion flits between other bonds. First there's surprise –him? Hurt? Almost offline? How can that be? It twists and turns until it's split into undecipherable ribbons of feelings, tied together into one. Because they are one. All of them. Their master powers their bonds, and they feed into them like hungry sparklings on their first rations. They need each other. They thrive on one another. To lose one means to lose parts of them all.

His master's afraid. And then, he's furious. An inferno of anger, so foreign to feel but so powerful all the same. It fuels their rage, smelts together their thoughts of, _"Who has done this? Who has hurt you? Who do we need to kill?"_

And suddenly, his master is here. He feels his powerful presence, his nearly feather-light touches on his painful frame. His master asks, and he gives. They connect, and he sends images and sensations and emotions in a way that's intimate, with vividness that can only be done through the powerful bond of creator and creation. Guardian and charge.

His master sees the fire and the explosion and he feels the pain and the fear. He sees the small, formerly insignificant forms of life who have caused his creation's state. He pauses the memories and scans the faces until his spark is fuming and his other charges are rattling inside his chest compartment like crazed mechanimals, eager to be set free so that they can inflict the harm that one of their bonded has suffered.

His master barks an order. He is unusually sharp and colored with emotion so rarely displayed in his monotone voice. Popping out from his compartment is a mass of angry hovering metal. He holds his injured creation in his arms and meets burning red optics with his own. He takes the human faces and transfers them.

 **"Lazerbeak,"** he says, **"Follow."**

* * *

 **Little short, but I hope it's still good!**

 **If you haven't already and you enjoy my writing, go check out my main story, _Savior_ too, which is a more flushed out AU of Age of Extinction featuring a rare DriftxOC pairing! My next update will be for that story (for those of you Savior fans waiting). :)**


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